Ever wanted to be in charge? Well, in my own little world I will be, one day. Just not quite yet. I'm a bit tired at the moment... maybe I'll take over after I've had my little nap.
The United Dingdom - stating the bleeding obvious so you don't have to.
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Sunday, 28 February 2016

Power Play

Yesterday I tweeted, slightly tongue in cheek, “...in the alternative universe I inhabit on
weekends, my entire class of wannabe electricians have all forgotten Ohm's Law.”
This turned out not to be a joke. Later in the day one of the class asked me
what a twin-and-earth cable was. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know, but
it’s just about the most common form of cable used in smaller electrical installations;
for somebody who has been supposedly studying the subject part-time for over a
year it is a scarcely credible knowledge gap.

I guess what disappointed me most was the lack of interest
on display. This particular student is a typical product of our age,
from a school system which churns out lacklustre, unengaged non-scholars with
an expectation that qualifications are achieved by mere attendance and that
personal effort need not be applied. Twas ever thus you might protest, but here
is a young man paying for a vocational course, presumably with the intention of
making a career out of the wiring game; you would think he might show a
smidgeon of a modicum, of a morsel of a spirit of enquiry.

But maybe this exactly meets the expectation of modern
world governments? Displaced by floods of migrant labour, a pointless extended
education pushed upon them, unreasonable aspiration dangled in front of their
noses and rendered utterly incurious about pretty much everything. Exactly the
kind of non-voter a state can rely on to not even notice the roof falling in
until it is pointed out to them, whereupon such alarums can confidently be
relied on to be accepted uncritically. Certainly those who issued the
proclamation from the G20 summit must believe so.

The Financial Times reported three days ago that ‘Britain’
was lobbying for such a warning to be issued and now it is official; if Britain
leaves the EU the sky will actually fall in. A major shock to the world’s
economy? Oh, purlease! How desperate are Cameron and Osborne for a result in
the referendum that they stoop this low? It was only a few days ago that the ‘Remain’
tack was to insist that if we left we would become an irrelevance; now our leaving
would shake the business foundations of the planet? How stupid must they think
we are? Oh, wait...

Meanwhile, back on the subject of electricity, we hear
news that the EU is delaying its imposition of power restrictions on things
like kettles and toasters. Delaying, mind, not cancelling. The imposition is
ludicrous, by the way. Quite apart from restricting commerce and innovation it
demonstrates that the EU’s finest minds don’t understand Ohm’s Law and basic
physics either, because a litre of water takes the same amount of energy to
boil whether it is done quickly or not; a less powerful kettle will cost just
as much to boil the same amount but take longer to do so. Maybe the plan is to
drive us mad by proving the adage that a watched kettle never boils?

London. The day after Brexit...

Project Fear rumbles on and with each passing
day the claims for apocalyptic calamity grow more extreme. We will have all the
downsides to membership without any positives, they insist. Our towns will be
overrun with immigrants and our children will be out of work. Terrorists will
roam the streets and occupy all the houses and the health service will collapse
under the tsunami of brown babies and mental illness. Industry will disappear forever
from the land that invented it and, yes, the sky will fall in. Unless, they
say, we allow all of our policies for every matter to be decided by Martin
Shultz and his pals. How soon before EU Thought Control takes over the information
services and - like state terrorism everywhere - pulls the plug on all
inconvenient news sources? If you thought ISIS was bad enough, wait for the
telly-ban.

3 comments:

If the UK leaves the EU it is not the UK that will put world economy in peril but the EU. If we stay in that peril does not go away it is lessened somewhat. That is what the G20 pronouncement is all about. They have made the correct deduction but are pointing their finger at the wrong culprit and deliberately so.

We know the EU because of the euro-zone is in an economic mess. They do have a habit of causing their own crises. Merkel and her open door madness and the Ukraine are an examples of them shooting themselves in the foot. Add to that the waste, inefficiency and incompetence of it's leaders, policies, laws, rules, regulations and institutions then you have an EU on the brink of collapse.

What the G20 fear is that Brexit will trigger that collapse. So they wish to avoid that by keeping the UK in the hope that given more time the EU will mend itself. A forlorn hope of course as in or out the EU is doomed because it is not a workable or sustainable project. Just a pipe dream that too many fell for and worse acted upon.